New Year’s Eve, 2012: With the world’s easy oil supplies tapped out, the energy giant Royal Dutch Shell has made an urgent, $6 billion bet on finding new reserves in one of Earth’s wildest environments—the frigid Arctic Ocean off Alaska. But the hunt for extreme oil pushes the world's biggest company past its limits, and disaster strikes. An oil rig, the Kulluk, breaks loose on the high seas and begins drifting toward the rocks of remote Kodiak Island. As a winter storm builds, Coast Guard helicopters race to rescue its crew, and a local sailor fights to keep the rig off the rocks.

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet? In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

If you've been reading various commentaries about Gold OA journals--including Part 1--you may be wondering where all those supposed no-fee Gold OA journals are. This piece helps to tell that story. Specifically, of 2,843 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of May 7, 2014 that have an English interface version, aren't from either OASPA members or Beall-list publishers, and are not about aspects of medicine or biology--and that actually published one or more articles between January 2011 and June 30, 2014--more than 78% do not charge fees of any sort, and those journals published 53% of the articles published by the whole group during that period. Those percentages grow to almost 92% and more than 81%, respectively, for 1,426 journals in the humanities and social sciences.

After reaching their fifties and raising their own children, Jenny and Richard Bowen adopted 2-year-old Maya from China after learning of poor orphanage conditions for abandoned girls. Sixteen years later, the Bowens have two adopted daughters from the same region and have started a non-profit called Half the Sky to transform orphan care with the cooperation of the Chinese government.

Mark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavoured the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet somehow, beneath the vast flowing river of literature that he left behind — books, sketches, speeches, not to mention the thousands of letters to his friends and his remarkable entries in private journals — the man who became Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has receded from view.

It is hard to imagine a life that encompassed more of its times. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted the western theater of the Civil War before taking off for an uproariously drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West. As his fame as a humorist and lecturer spread, witnessing the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and the Gilded Age (which he named). He travelled to Europe on the first American pleasure cruise and revitalized the prim genre of travel writing. He wooed and won his lifelong devoted wife, yet quietly pined for the girl who was his first crush and whom he would re-encounter many decades later. He invented and invested in get-rich-quick schemes. He became the toast of Europe and a celebrity who toured the globe. His comments on everything he saw, many published here for the first time, are priceless.

In 1996 Packard Bell put out a commercial that tried to show urban existence as negative with the point of the commercial being that using a Packard Bell computer "You can do it all from home". Librarians objected to the negative image of the library. The commercial has storm trooper like characters marching around the library shushing people. Packard Bell changed the commercial and lifted out the library scenes. The version here shows the library scene.

SIOUX CITY | During one of their weekly outings, DeeDee Johnson spent the afternoon with her 6-year-old grandson fostering his fascination with four fictional crime-fighting brothers and books. Devin Riley became a certified Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in training at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Wednesday. Though the boy likes Leonardo the most, the blue-masked leader hardly compares to his sensei – his grandma.